An annoying feature of the new smartphones is that they often devote a substantial portion of their horsepower to figuring out how to get more of my money via adverts, music, etc.

This is not surprising but you'd like the option of being able to shut it off. In the case of some phones (don't want to point the finger and have people oogling my info..;-), you can't uninstall it. Fortunately, my phone is old enough so that the installed app won't work with the current "store" and I AM able to deinstall all of the updates. However, even with the notifications box unchecked, it still pesters me to update... Grrr. So hopefully the smartness in the newer designs won't have similar annoying features.

What will really make smartphones smarter are advances in the UI -- intelligent assistants like Siri, fingerprint or retinal scan security, and features like Samsung's eye detection that pauses video when you look away. These are all steps in the right direction, but there is a lot of room for improvement.